


As Larks, Harmoniously

by SylvanWitch



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Apocafic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 18:49:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The end is just the beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As Larks, Harmoniously

On a bridge in Jericho, Dean had said no.

 

Hands fisted in Sam’s jacket, Sam’s hands bracketing Dean’s hips, he’d seen the light spark in Sam’s eyes like a spirit flame, prophesying doom, and he’d said, “No.”

 

Sam still wore the presence of Jess on him like a scent, a certain deference to the inside when he walked, a certain expectation on his face when he started to say something, and then memory like an iron shutter slamming his expression shut.

 

Dean wouldn’t be a consolation prize, even if it would console Sam, because he foresaw with surprising clarity the path they’d tread then:  obsessive passion, desperate need, resentment, and ultimately destruction.

 

They’d walked it anyway, though Dean had said no. 

 

Through grief and sorrow, on the road to Hell, from pine-blasted desolate clearing to searing regret at the edge of forever, from Pit to Cage to angelic madness.

 

They’d made their way alone and together, hands to themselves, eyes always ahead, afraid of looking back lest the salt tears turn them to pillars.

 

And here they are.

 

They’ve escaped the fray and are panting, worn and almost worthless, the last of their strength trickling out to make a shadow darker than blood on the filthy floor.

 

Maybe he believes there’s no point in holding out, that tomorrow’s regrets don’t matter because the day for them is done, the battle fought, the field yielded to others who will fight and lose and die.

 

Whatever the cause, Dean says, “Yes.”

 

At first, he’s sure Sam hasn’t heard.  His brother, still as stone, hands on knees, head down, says nothing.

 

Dean’s voice is a wreck of broken sound, shattered over shouting orders and screaming retreats.

 

His posture mimicking his brother’s, he strains his neck to look at the crown of Sam’s head, at the matted hair that hangs over his brow, at the tip of his nose, just visible, as if those things offer cipher to a code only Dean can read.

 

And then Sam looks up, and in his eyes is the same light he’d offered Dean in a faraway fairytale when everything was still possible and nothing had been decided except with Dean’s single word of denial.

 

Sam reaches with a shaking, begrimed hand, coaxes a sigh from Dean’s cracked lips by ghosting his fingertips over his split cheek, clotted to sluggish weeping in the aftermath of the last engagement.

 

The sigh turns to a moan from Sam as he manages himself upright, a process of slow degrees and painful syllables, and Dean does likewise, though he feels as though he’ll never unbend his bruised spine.

 

His brother hesitates, waits for Dean to look at him, searching for something in Dean’s eyes that lets Sam know it’s not just a last grand gesture but something wanted for itself alone and for them only.

Finally, Sam dips his chin in assent and closes the space between them.

 

Their bodies come together, intensifying their shared charnel house smell, but it’s beyond Dean to care with his brother’s strength like a solid wall against which he can at last rest his impossible burden.

 

Their dropped clothes raise a cloud of ghosts, the dust of people long gone filling the air with the remains of the family whose tomb they are using for shelter, until they are stripped of every reminder of the outside world and stand only in their own skins, scarred with intimate history mapped by trembling fingers.

 

A bullet wound in his brother’s shoulder that Dean had never touched except to sew up.

 

An angry, raised handprint Sam covers with his rightful, possessive hand.

 

The silvered worms from knives and claws, the puckered pink of new wounds, all of it claimed in an onslaught of teeth and tongues, lips murmuring words like healing prayers over the outraged flesh.

 

At last, undone by tenderness, breath short in their throats, the brothers kneel, chest to chest, hands joined over the straining evidence of their mutual need, and they wring from each other the words they’ve rarely said—and never in voices loud enough for angels to hear, for the angels are jealous of such undying love, incapable of understanding but utterly ready to annihilate what they themselves can never have.

 

Then:  “Yes,” Dean shouts, “Sam, yes!” even as Sam clutches at Dean’s nape and pulls him in for a breath-stealing kiss that swallows further words.

 

The blinding white light that makes a vacuum of the room’s moted air flares brilliant behind their bliss-closed eyes.  With a crack that should shear away the very face of heaven, the light goes out as sudden as it came, leaving two soldiers blinking and swaying, holding each other upright as the world rocks back to stillness.

 

They rise on shaking legs, hands bracing their unsteady ascension until the shadows resume their usual shapes and they can make out in the ruins of the tomb around them a more definite pattern, as of two pairs of implied wings unfurled in triumph against the evidence of man’s mortality.

 

Naked as they came into the world, they step out again into it, finding the sky clear of smoke and the air fresh and pure, painted with the bright stars of the dark before the dawn.

 

With wonder they stare at a garden remade, at the others who stumble in a happy haze through the new and ancient promise of redemption.

 

No one pays their nakedness any mind as the brothers shuffle, feet unsteady on the soft green grass, taking in what they have wrought with their inevitable surrender.

 

“I love you,” they say together as the first rays of a new day paint the sky in impossible colors and the first lark of the morning sings high overhead, piercing the last resistance of the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken with great reverence from "Denial," by seventeenth century English poet George Herbert.


End file.
